If there is a genuine champion in Congress for flood control projects, it would be Navotas City Rep. Toby Tiangco. Before his congressional stint for three consecutive terms, Tiangco served as the mayor of Navotas City, which is known as one of the most flood-prone cities in our country. Surrounded by Manila Bay and the Navotas-Malabon River, the city of Navotas is most vulnerable to severe flooding risks during typhoons, heavy monsoon rains and tidal inundations.
Now on his second term in the 20th Congress, Tiangco credited the 22-year-old KAMANAVA (Kaloocan-Malabon-Navotas-Valenzuela) Flood Control Project as a model program of well implemented foreign-assisted projects (FAP) that was undertaken according to design and specifications. It was funded under highly concessional loans from Japan’s Special Yen Loan Package granted to the Philippines by the late Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi.
“Flood control is very personal to me. This project reduced flooding in Navotas from 160 days a year to just three to five days. But with climate change, we need to ensure our defenses are stronger,” Tiangco pointed out.
Speaking at the Kapihan sa Manila Bay news forum last Wednesday, Tiangco thanked President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. (PBBM) for directing the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) to look for funds in the rehabilitation of this project. Tiangco recalled PBBM issued this directive to DPWH Secretary Manuel Bonoan during an inspection visit in Navotas after the most recent flooding due to typhoons that coincided with the high tide and habagat rains.
Through the years, Tiangco cited this project has lessened flood damages and helped improve the living conditions of people residing in these areas through the construction of a ring-dike system and pumping stations.The KAMANAVA Flood Control and Drainage System Improvement Project cost P3.464 million (8,929 million yen), charged to the Obuchi Funds.
According to Climate Resilience Alliance, local area estimates indicated that more than 57 percent of the informal settler families (ISFs) in Navotas City live along the coastlines and are the most susceptible to the impact of flooding. The Zurich-based Alliance also noted Navotas City, along with the city of Manila, are at-risk of sinking below sea level.
Since the Navotas floodgate was completed in 2003, Tiangco pointed to its repeated breakdowns as now causing the renewed severe flooding in their city. The latest breakdown took place last May 12 when a fishing vessel and four tugboats accidentally rammed and damaged the gate. Thus, he urged the DPWH to speed up the study on the rehabilitation of his city’s flood control system and the possible construction of a second navigational floodgate to prevent widespread flooding.
It was with a heavy heart that Tiangco conceded that the flood control projects have unfairly earned a bad reputation after as much as P545 million included in the budgets for the past three years turned out to be “ghosts,” or non-existent projects at all. Tiangco vividly recalled the President’s utter dismay in his fourth State of the Nation Address (SONA) before them in Congress last July 28.
Mincing no words, PBBM talked and used the language of corruption: “Mga kickback, mga initiatives, errata, S.O.P., ‘for the boys’… Mahiya naman kayo sa mga kabahayan nating naanod o nalubog sa mga pagbaha!” Since “initiatives” and “errata” are terms that pertain to the General Appropriations Act (GAA), the President’s “shame on you” was directly addressed to all of them in the 19th Congress, Tiangco pointed out.
“Errata” is a Latin word (erratum when it’s singular) that means a list of errors in a printed work discovered after printing and shown with corrections.
The 2025 GAA – that also contained the National Expenditure Program (NEP) – was littered “errata” after it went through the scrutiny of both the Senate and the Lower House. Many of these “errata” were discovered in the DPWH flood control allocations and FAPs in infra projects under the 2025 unprogrammed budget provisions.
These “errata” entries and the congressional “initiatives” were included in the “list” that the President asked in his SONA for the DPWH to submit. Nonetheless, PBBM still signed into law the 2025 GAA. But the President vetoed all of them after diligent line-by-line review done by the Cabinet, led by Department of Budget and Management Secretary Amenah Pangandaman.
A week after his SONA, the President unmasked last week the initial 15 contractors that cornered the biggest amounts of these “ghost” flood control projects. Supposedly carried out in various flood-prone areas in our country, the Chief Executive explained, these contractors cornered the biggest amounts of flood control projects in the annual budgets of the DPWH in the GAA from years 2022 to 2025.
Red-faced with anger, the President revealed a legal team at Malacañang has been poring over documents and other pieces of evidence on these “ghost” projects under investigation. The probes will include public complaints so far received online from the “Isumbong mo sa Pangulo” website.
PBBM vowed to throw the book at and apply the fullest force of the law on “economic sabotage” against contractors and their cohorts in government. While he vowed not to spare anyone, the President though stopped short of specifically identifying anyone from the Marcos administration allies in Congress.
Tiangco admitted he would not be surprised if some of his colleagues in Congress will be among them. After all, the annual budget bill emanates from the House of Representatives before it goes to the Senate, the 57-year-old veteran lawmaker pointed out.
Thus, Tiangco made his impassioned appeals to his fellow members of the 20th Congress to stay out of their plans to conduct “inquiry in aid of legislation” on these alleged “ghost” flood control projects.
It will turn into a grand cover-up since the “errata” all came from Congress, Tiangco warned.
Flooding is Nature’s worst way of dumping back to us the garbage we wantonly throw anywhere. But these crooks in Congress and their syndicate members in government who littered the nation’s budget with “errata” of “ghost” flood control projects deserve Nature’s wrath to die in jail.